Wanderlust Read Online Free Page B

to my bra and panties and dove off the diving board, not caring about the inconvenience of wet clothes. It was the sort of thing I couldn’t not do. A dim sort of logic was at work: If I became the kind of person who jumped into swimming pools in her underwear after midnight, in a terraced garden on the Mediterranean, then a life that presented these sorts of opportunities would accrue.
    In a nightclub in Gandía, the youth of Europe danced in the strobe lights to acid house music, vocalists crying out over throbbing electronica. Every ten minutes I’d see a boy from some Nordic country, with long blond curling hair, and feel desperate for him to turn around and be Graham. I carried these feelings with me like a shadow self, always walking along beside me, riding on the motorcycle with me, swimming in a pool or the sea. I imagined him seeing me see whatever I saw.
    One night we went to Casa Dorita after hours. Chairs were stacked on tables, and the glass-doored refrigerator gave off a glow.
Pepe spread seat cushions on the floor. The illicit place excited me, and we fucked in a beam of light filtered through orange soda. Afterward he fetched ice cream bars from the kitchen. As one melted, he dragged it along my collarbone, then lapped it up. It seemed like a kind of dare: What could we dream up next? Our bodies and minds were landscapes, and I could do anything at night.
    When I saw Pepe during the daytime or early evening now, I wanted to touch him or be touched. But we couldn’t kiss during business hours at Casa Dorita, nor when he pulled up at El Portet in the Spanish coast guard’s Zodiac.
    Giddy at our discoveries, we had sex with sweet ingredients from the restaurant kitchen, sex with an empty glass soda bottle, and sex on a large, flat rock that flanked the pier at the marina. It was like marking territory—both the physical terrain of Moraira and an experiential map I was forming in my own head. The night at the marina, my house key fell down between the rocks. I was appalled that I would now have to knock on the door and wake someone up, and that Maria José and Toni would now realize just how late I was coming home. I knocked with dread at about 4:00 AM. The door clicked open, and as I pushed it in I glimpsed Maria José hurrying away naked from the foyer. They had a new key made for me the next day.
    I stopped monitoring the time going by. On the beach at El Portet one day I saw Abby, the girl from California I’d met my first week. She spotted me from a distance and marched in my direction, wearing enormous green shorts over a blue one-piece. She wanted to speak to a fellow-sort-of-American. “Did you hear?” she asked. “There’s a war.” Iraq had invaded Kuwait. I hadn’t heard. I hadn’t seen a television or newspaper in weeks. The whole subject seemed very far away, and I couldn’t identify with the lumbering
ambassador from the United States. This beach was my world now. People knew me here. I looked askance at the sunburned and topless Brits; I was tanned and be-topped. My boyfriend came in with the coast guard, and a Spanish child held my hand. I enjoyed my sense of pseudo-belonging, even as I knew that I’d leave. The traveler always betrays the place.

    Pepe had a small apartment over Casa Dorita that he shared with a friend, and when the friend was away we sometimes went there. I found it exotically domestic to be in a bed with a man in his actual home, even if it was just a cramped bachelor pad. We’d managed to evolve a sort of banter. He was trying to explain to me why he found the English-language word sure so comical. It was because if you drew it out, and said “shuuuurrrre,” it sounded like an engine revving.
    â€œPepe,” I said.
    â€œYou know, it’s been a long time since you’ve said my name like that,” he said. I completely forgot what I’d been planning to say, and something else jumped to